Re:Gender works to end gender inequity by exposing root causes and advancing research-informed action. Working with multiple sectors and disciplines, we are shaping a world that demands fairness across difference.

Globalization, Human Rights & Security

Women make up a majority of the world’s poor; more than half of immigrants, refugees and casualties of armed conflicts; and they are often the first to feel the brunt of economic, political, environmental and humanitarian crises. At the same time, women are essential partners for promoting conflict resolution, reducing extremism and promoting post-conflict reconstruction and sustainable development. However, governments and international organizations often overlook the significant contributions and vital perspectives of women and girls, thereby undermining effective security policies and peace-building initiatives. Human rights advocates and security experts are calling for more efforts to invest in women, implement gender-sensitive laws and policies and ensure that women are included at decision-making tables.
Explore the resources listed below, including Related Categories links, or use the Keyword Search for more information.

As a participant at the nongovernmental organization forum that accompanied the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995, I witnessed a delegation of Korean "comfort women" survivors who were trying to call attention to their victimization as sex slaves for the Japanese military during World War II.

By then, they were no longer young and some indeed looked frail, but they made a powerful and striking presence to demand recognition of their history.

In the early 1990s, Kim Hak Soon was the first former comfort woman to speak out, at the age of 67, and her testimony inspired other women to do the same. Within one year more than 200 other Korean women who had been enslaved as comfort women came forward. They have joined together, supported each other and shared their experience.

A local monument to these brave women was the subject of a startling May 19 story in The New York Times. The first surprise was my own ignorance of the monument, just across the Hudson River from New York City, in Palisades Park, N.J., where more than half of the population is of Korean descent. Since it's the only one of its kind in the U.S., it seemed strange that it had not attracted widespread publicity and become a major pilgrimage site for women's advocates.

A report from the International Rescue Committee (IRC) finds that in countries recovering from war in West Africa, domestic violence is the biggest threat to women's safety.

The report, called "Let Me Not Die Before My Time: Domestic Violence In West Africa," reveals that "across Ivory Coast, Liberia and Sierra Leone, years after the official end of these countries' brutal wars, women are being intimidated, threatened and beaten with shocking frequency."

Though domestic violence is a global issue affecting about one in three women worldwide, IRC chose to focus on these three West African countries to show how the problem can become more severe in post-conflict environments.

The report is based on 10 years of research and direct interaction with women and government leaders in Liberia, Ivory Coast and Sierra Leone. All three countries were embroiled in violent civil wars a decade ago, and those tensions remain.

The European Parliament this week adopted a report urging Turkey to follow up on its recent work toward securing gender equality and women's rights.

The report, written by Socialists & Democrats Member of European Parliament Emine Bozkurt, lays out a series of goals for Ankara to accomplish by 2020 in raising the status of women to fully equal members of Turkish society as Brussels and Ankara seek to breathe life into the country's stalled EU accession bid.

The Dutch lawmaker's report was accepted unanimously by the legislative body's Women's Rights and Gender Equality Commission in March, and Tuesday was approved by the entire EP meeting in a plenary session, with 590 votes in favor, 28 against and 53 abstentions, the Italian news agency ANSAmed reported.

Riding Australia's resources boom like no one else, BRW magazine's annual rich list yesterday revealed the 58-year-old mining magnate's wealth has ballooned by an unparalleled $18.87 billion in the past year to $29.17 billion.

That equates to $598 a second, more than $1 million for every half an hour - and almost $52 million a day.

Ms Rinehart is now the richest woman in the world, surpassing the $25 billion of Christy Walton, the widow of Wal-Mart founder John Walton, who still has a major stake in the US retail giant.

Ms Rinehart's meteoric rise led experts to speculate she is a serious contender to become the world's richest person. She would have to pass the $69 billion fortune of Mexican telco mogul Carlos Slim.

Over the course of 2011’s momentous Arab Spring uprisings, young women in Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, Bahrain and Yemen used social media and cyberactivism to carve out central roles in the revolutionary struggles under way in their countries, according to a new study commissioned by Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy.

Like their sisters all over the developing world, women farmers work hard to grow food for themselves and their families, and for sale. They plant and tend, fertilize and weed, harvest and process -- in short, do all it takes to produce a crop. But they don't get much in return. Their yields are low and, even if some crops are sold, the women may not see any income since men who take the crop to market may not feel obliged to share it.

When international development projects come around to try to change these conditions, they don't always reach out to women farmers. They assume that the women are not the "real" farmers because they don't own land or go to market, or because they have other household responsibilities such as fetching water and caring for children.

However, studies done in many developing countries show that women undertake a variety of farm work along with their household chores. Despite this reality, women are left out of projects that offer new technologies, improved fertilizers or training in practices that could help them produce more. Other studies show that when women have the same access as men to such farming resources, women could produce more, earn more and live better lives.

Fortunately, there is growing support for women farmers like those I met in Tanzania. It comes from the highest levels in global agreements like the G8 L'Aquila Food Security Initiative -- which committed $20 billion over three years for sustainable agriculture development -- and policies such as the United States Agency for International Development's Feed the Future initiative.

Following the 1997 Asian financial crisis and the spate of corporate frauds and accounting scandals such as Enron, WorldCom, Parmalat, Satyam and China Aviation Oil (Singapore), there has been considerable research about the effectiveness of the board of directors in the corporate governance of firms. There are strong conceptual and business propositions for greater board diversity. In the corporate world, there has been anecdotal evidence from some large corporations such as IBM, Ford Motor, Nortel, Lucent, Sara Lee, Texaco, and DuPont that diversity at every level of the work force tothe board of directors of firms have been cited as an imperative for business success.

According to research published by the American Psychological Association, female terrorists are likely to be educated, employed and native residents of the country where they commit a terrorist act - much like their male counterparts.

The findings contradict stereotypes presented in previous studies that describe female terrorists as socially isolated and vulnerable to recruitment because they are uneducated, unemployed and from a foreign land, psychologists reported in a study published online in the APA journal Law and Human Behavior. These assumptions are not supported by evidence, according to the study authors.

New maternal mortality estimates confirm that the number of women dying in pregnancy and childbirth is declining. Along with other indicators, this joint U.N. report validates the fact that we are making progress in saving mothers’ lives, even if progress is slower than what is called for by the Millennium Development Goals.

Rapid progress in some countries demonstrates that when governments take a strategic approach to the safe motherhood challenge -- by deploying trained midwives, ensuring adequate essential supplies, making family planning accessible and providing timely obstetric care to women with complications, we are getting results. Still, there is more work to be done in delivering a world where every pregnancy is wanted and every childbirth is safe.